Editorial: Move quickly on report

Sunday, July 29, 2007 | 7:05 a.m.

President Bush narrowly avoided a public relations nightmare last week after receiving a commissioned report on veterans care.

The report was researched and written by a team led by former Republican Sen. Robert Dole and former Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala, who served in the Clinton administration.

Bush ordered the report in March after The Washington Post reported on miserable living conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the bewildering paperwork and confusing sequence of care that injured troops often have to contend with.

White House spokesman Tony Snow initially announced Wednesday that Bush would not be taking any immediate action on the report, even though its authors stressed that their recommendations required a "sense of urgency" and "strong leadership."

Later on Wednesday, however, according to the Post, Bush personally announced that he had instructed Defense Secretary Robert Gates and outgoing Veterans Affairs Secretary Jim Nicholson "to look at every one of these recommendations, to take them seriously and to implement them."

Had the White House maintained its original attitude, all members of the military could have justifiably felt betrayed. The report, titled "Serve, Support, Simplify," exposes a military health care system that mirrors civilian health care, with all of its attendant problems. Service members injured in defense of their country deserve better.

If the report's recommendations are adopted and administered as envisioned by the authors, every seriously injured soldier will have an individual recovery plan and a coordinator would be assigned to supervise the plan's follow-through. Disability and compensation systems will be restructured to make them comprehensible and uniform. More efficient procedures will be in place to diagnose and treat brain injuries and mental illnesses such as post-traumatic stress disorder. Support for families of injured troops will be greatly strengthened. The Defense and Veterans Affairs departments will have an improved system for sharing records.

We believe the Dole-Shalala commission has produced a succinct and coherent report whose recommendations could be - and should be - readily adopted.

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